+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 18, Issue 41, April 8, 2020. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 41 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: HTML. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Designing for Cognitive Accessibility: Where to Begin By Glenda Sims. "…Effective COGA design is all about using mental energy wisely. Do not waste anyone's cognitive effort on overly complex or distracting user interfaces. Help people efficiently use their minds to accomplish the goal that brought them to your site in the first place. These recommended techniques are a solid place to start addressing COGA needs. Discover for yourself how good design is cognitively efficient design." https://thenextweb.com/growth-quarters/2020/04/06/designing-for-cognitive-accessibility-where-to-begin/ Accessible Digital Map Experiences: A Mountain Climb Or A Walk In The Park? By David Sloan. "So how can we apply a sensible strategy to deal with map inaccessibility in a way that benefits everyone? Let’s consider maps from an accessible user-experience perspective…" https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2020/04/accessible-digital-map-experiences/ 'Person, Shoes, Tree. Is the Person Naked?' What People with Vision Impairments Want in Image Descriptions By Meredith Ringel Morris et al. "Access to digital images is important to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). Many contemporary image description efforts do not take into account this population's nuanced image description preferences. In this paper, we present a qualitative study that provides insight into 28 BLV people's experiences with descriptions of digital images from news websites, social networking sites/platforms, eCommerce websites, employment websites, online dating websites/platforms, productivity applications, and e-publications. Our findings reveal how image description preferences vary based on the source where digital images are encountered and the surrounding context. We provide recommendations for the development of next-generation image description technologies inspired by our empirical analysis…" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/person-shoes-tree-is-the-person-naked-what-people-with-vision-impairments-want-in-image-descriptions/ Short Note on Image of Text to Text Workflow for Twitter By Steve Faulkner. "I read the article by Deborah Edwards-Onaro 'Quick Tip: How to Convert Image Text to Text' and found the method described to be easy and largely successful (minimal post conversion editing needed). I then thought that this could be useful for the many images of text posted on twitter (without alt text). I have seen a number of people making pleas, to provide alt text for images (including infographics and text provided as an image, especially in tweets containing useful information related to COVID-19)…" https://codepen.io/stevef/post/short-note-on-image-of-to-text-workflow-for-twitter Understanding SC 1.4.10 Reflow By Raghavendra Satish Peri. "People with low vision use zoom functionality more often than not to read the contents of a web site. In some cases, some users may require more than 200% or - to be more specific - up to 400% of zoom to read the content. Given this use case, there is a high chance of content being hidden to a particular side or being cut off, making it difficult to read…" https://www.digitala11y.com/understanding-sc-1-4-10-reflow/ Accessibility for Digital Businesses: How Your Company Can Be a Leader By Kim Krause Berg. "Digital businesses with accessible websites are demonstrating leadership by example…" https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ethical-accessibility-practices-for-digital-businesses/356632/ 2017-2019 Accessing Higher Ground Conference (Audio & Video) Hat Tip to Howard Kramer. https://www.uduc.org/resources/audio-video-library/ Accessibility Suffers During Pandemic By Greta Anderson. "Students with disabilities and their advocates say access to equitable education has been abandoned in the scramble to move classes online…" https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/06/remote-learning-shift-leaves-students-disabilities-behind The WebAIM Million-Updated By Dennis E. Lembree. "The WebAIM Million report, an accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages, has been recently updated. Here's a summary of the update from WebAIM. Sadly, per the report data, the state of web access hasn't improved much, and has actually worsened overall…" http://www.webaxe.org/the-webaim-million-updated/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Responsive Images the Simple Way By Scott Vandehey. "The responsive images spec is fantastic and covers a lot of use cases, but in my experience, most of the time you'll only need to understand one of them: Serving a different sized copy of the same image depending on the user's viewport width. We call this resolution switching, and you can accomplish it using the srcset and sizes attributes…" https://cloudfour.com/thinks/responsive-images-the-simple-way/ Updates to Form Controls and Focus By Rob Dodson. "…the teams at Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome spent the last year collaborating to retheme and improve the functionality of the built-in form controls on Chromium browsers. The two teams also worked to make the focused states of form controls and other interactive elements like links easier to perceive…" https://blog.chromium.org/2020/03/updates-to-form-controls-and-focus.html +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. What Makes a Good Usability Test? (Video) By David Travis. "I answer the question, 'You've spoken before about how a non-specialist can judge the quality of user research done in Discovery. But how do you decide if a usability test has been run the right way?…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Au2NoSSg-A Doing User Research During a Pandemic (Video) By David Travis. "I answer the question, 'It appears the spread of the coronavirus is inevitable. I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how to do user research during this pandemic? Especially when one must be in close proximity to ask questions.'…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQHQ2i_S8aM Decoding an Unexpected User Testing Result Using Neuroscience By Lydia Wright. "If you have ever run a user testing study before, you may have experienced a scenario where you have observed a user do something completely unexpected. It can sometimes be difficult to fathom observed user behaviour. In this article we decode an unexpected user testing result with the help of some basic neuroscience principles…" https://usabilitygeek.com/decoding-an-unexpected-user-testing-result-using-neuroscience/ Traps for Usability Test Moderators (Video) By David Travis. "I answer the question, 'What advice do you have for someone about to moderate a usability test for the first time?'…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnZMpVCPdNI Remote User Research Tips By Salma Patel. "I have typed these tips up very quickly based on my experience of doing remote research (on a Sunday morning with my little one looking over). I will add to it, but please send over your tips to add in too…" http://salmapatel.co.uk/user-research/remote-user-research-tips Remote Usability Testing - Best Practices By Vikas Kalwani. "…Remote usability testing is cheaper than in-person testing. A large number of participants can be recruited. However, the remote testing process comes with its own set of challenges. The insights gained from remote testing are closer to the real world. Conduct moderated usability tests if you want to see the participants taking the test real-time and if you want to ask follow-up questions. " https://usabilitygeek.com/remote-usability-testing-best-practices/ Passive Information Acquisition on the Increase By Feifei Liu. "People increasingly discover critical information online without actively searching for it, but such information has poor context and may have credibility issues." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/passive-information-acquisition/ +04: EVENTS. Introduction to Web Accessibility Online. Now-April 30, 2020. https://www.edx.org/course/web-accessibility-introduction If It's Interactive, It Needs a Focus Style April 14, 2020. Online. https://www.meetup.com/a11ychi/events/269882287/ M-Enabling Summit September 14-16, 2020. (New Date) Washington, D.C., U.S.A. http://www.m-enabling.com/ ACCESS September 17, 2020. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. https://www.3playmedia.com/access/ National Association of Government Web (NAGW) Conference September 23-25, 2020. Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.A. https://nagw.org/content.php?page=conference Adobe MAX October 19-21, 2020. Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. https://max.adobe.com/ +05: HTML. HTML Forms Right By Austin Gil. "…In this series, we will examine the proper steps to creating forms for the web, how to think about the code we write, and considerations to make along the way. The series is broken up into the following parts…" https://stegosource.com/how-to-build-html-forms-right-semantics/ Disabled Form Controls and How to Tackle Them By Cătălin Roșu. "…In this article, you'll find out how to use the HTML disabled boolean attribute, toggle it with JavaScript and style disabled form controls…" https://catalin.red/disabled-form-controls/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. What Frontend Engineers Should Know About Backend By Alexander. "…Here's the short list of topics that a frontend engineer should know about the backend…" https://terrastruct.com/blog/what-frontend-engineers-should-know-about-backend/ ARIA in Roles and Relationships By Sarah Higley. "… a budding accessibility practitioner might find themselves experimenting with more serious roles like menu, listbox, or even treegrid. These are tantalizing, powerful patterns that allow you to create experiences that are not supported by only vanilla HTML. Unfortunately, they are also brittle; even small mistakes in using these roles can take a user on a very bad trip…" https://sarahmhigley.com/writing/roles-and-relationships/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Why Do We Copy and Paste So Much? By Gerry McGovern. "…Digital storage is exploding and it will do tremendous damage to our planet if we don't radically change our behaviors and stop saving and copying everything…" https://gerrymcgovern.com/why-do-we-copying-and-paste-so-much/ +08: USABILITY. What Can UX do to Help With Covid-19? (Video) By Jakob Nielsen. "At the very first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered a participant question about what user experience can do to help with the coronavirus crisis." https://www.nngroup.com/videos/ux-and-covid-19/ How People Read Online: New and Old Findings By Kate Moran. "Looking back at findings from a series of eyetracking studies over 13 years, we see that fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/ Users Don't Hate Change. They Hate Our Design Choices. By Jared Spool. "…We can take responsibility for creating the poor experience that many users face when we change our design out from under them. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't make changes. It means we should be thoughtful about how we migrate users to the new design…" https://articles.uie.com/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate-our-design-choices/ 25% of E-Commerce Sites Don't Have Product Images with Sufficient Resolution or Level of Zoom By Edward Scott. "…despite the importance of product images, our benchmark reveals that 25% of e-commerce sites provide product images that are insufficient for users' need to perform a visual exploration and evaluation of a product - and that's despite our benchmark primarily assessing a site's most popular categories and products…" https://baymard.com/blog/ensure-sufficient-image-resolution-and-zoom [Don't] Listen to Your Customers By Kristen Berman and June Park John. "…a sole reliance on customer input and feedback is built on an antiquated model of human decision making that assumes humans are rational…In order to truly understand user motivation, we need to often go beyond the interview and dig deep into observation and environment…" https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/dont-listen-to-your-customers/ How to Improve Page Speed from Start to Finish (Advanced Guide) By Patrick Stox. "There are lots of tools to test page speed, and lots of different metrics to target. But do you understand how those optimizations work, or whether they're actually going to make your website faster…" https://ahrefs.com/blog/advanced-pagespeed-guide/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html Association Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html Book Listings. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html Cascading Style Sheets Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html Color Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html Drupal Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/drupal.html Evaluation & Testing Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html Event Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html HTML Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/html.html Information Architecture Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html JavaScript Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html Miscellaneous Web Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html Navigation Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html PHP Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html Sites & Blogs Listing. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html Tool Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html Typography Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html Usability Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html XML Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html [Section two ends.] ++END NOTES. + SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webdev_listserv.html The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates. + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN). As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN guideline information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGN OFF. Until next time, Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN U.S.A. 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]